Investor Updates
How startup founders today can send regular, meaningful (and easy) updates to their investors.
It once was that startup founders typically had one or two big investors, so keeping them updated on your startup’s progress was a simple matter. Usually it was a partner at Sequoia calling you up saying “How the hell are things going over there, and when are you buying me lunch?!?!”.
Today’s world is a bit different. Seed-stage startups in 2024 tend to use rolling SAFE’s, an investment instrument that stays open continuously and is well-suited for investors of any size. So your $500K seed round may have come from 50 small investors who want to be kept informed, and you don’t want to be having lunch meetings with 50 different investors every month!
From the investor side things are different as well. A small investor like myself might have a little bit of money in a dozen different startups. I like to be kept informed, but I don’t want to be calling all those founders and bothering them all the time.
So in 2024 there’s definitely an art to sending investor updates that are meaningful and useful to investors as well as easy and efficient of you. I received one this week that I think is a great example, and I’ve pasted it below (anonymized into a fictional venture):
Dear Bret:
Things are progressing well at Fitaco. I’m happy to have a call with you anytime, but for efficiency’s sake, here’s your quarterly update:
Current 1-sentence description: For busy people who want to eat healthy, Fitaco delivers fresh, healthy tacos directly to your home or office.
Numbers:
- Customers on the waitlist: 4,634.
- CAC on those: $34.50
- Customer development interviews: 150+
- Startup Team: 3 FTE, plus freelancers.
- Monthly burn: ~$8k
- Runway: 15 months
- Public launch: March 1st
- Total capital raised: $875k. Last investment made at $8m valuation cap on Dec 24th.
Notable Events:
- Great: A senior ML engineer from Meta got super excited about Fitaco and invested!
- Good: Our team has developed a roadmap for the next 12–16 months. I am happy to share it with you during a call.
- Could have been better: Holiday season slowed a lot of things down, and we have had to push the public launch by two weeks.
How you can help:
- I post regularly to the socials, trying to get people excited about our launch in March. If you can watch for those and repost them to your network, it will really help us to increase our exposure!
- We will likely do another fundraising round in the second half of the year so we’d like to start having those conversations now. If each current investor can make two intros for us it would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks very much. Let me know if you have any questions. Here’s to a great 2024 ahead for us all!
Nancy Smith
CEO and Founder
Fitaco, Inc.
I hope this post was helpful to you. And, because great founders know how to Always be Selling, let me mention that my new book, The Launch Path, is available on Amazon now. :-)
